Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: And I'm Nicole. Welcome to the DAC Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We're so happy you could join us. We're both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids, strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will all be covered in this podcast. Parents are not alone, and we want to give voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed. Need in school and in the world. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 110. That feels like a big number. It does feel like a big number. Some of these numbers just really stick out to me. Like, wow, look at all the things.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: All the things.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Yeah. We are rounding the bend on our second anniversary of podcasting together.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: We are?
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Yeah. This is probably like the week of our.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Oh, the first one. Yeah.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Because it is officially October here where we record, and that means it is Dyslexia awareness month. And that is when we launched two years ago, Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: So happy anniversary was yesterday. It does.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Two whole years of podcasting together. That feels awesome.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: It does.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: So this episode, episode 110, we're going to start, like, we have every single other episode, and that is with the concept of the week. So the concept of the week is our opportunity to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit and let everyone into an intervention session. We like to teach about things either we would be teaching directly to our students or things that we would be educating parents, family, caregivers about.
So today's concept of the week is a statistical concept that I think is misused and misunderstood kind of a lot. So I want to really make sure we actually understand what it is.
So today's concept of the week is standard deviation.
So a standard deviation, it's a statistical measure, and it tells us how spread out the numbers in a data set are from the average or the mean value.
So if you're picturing kind of a normal bell curve, that very tip at the very top, top, top, that's your exactly average score. If you're looking at percentiles, that's going to be your 50th percentile. And then how far away your individual score is from that 50th point, that is the standard deviation. How far away from the mean is that value?
That is, like I said, something that Definitely gets misused and it also gets thrown around there. I've had parents ask me kind of sheepishly under the table, like, wow, I just sat in my kid's IEP and they told me that he's a hot, you know, 1.5 standard deviations from the mean. And I have no idea what that means. And like, can you explain that to me?
And I'm absolutely, absolutely. I'd love to explain that to you. And by the way, they should have when they were giving you that data.
So I think it's important to have that education part.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Yes. So welcome to episode 110. We are talking about dyslexia and giftedness or the choice exceptional experience.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: So let's kind of put this in perspective. Kind of like a.
Let's think about it as a story, right?
You know, a 10 year old who can explain how a jet engine works.
They can debate the merits of different chess openings, tell you the entire plot of a 400 page novel because somebody read that to them.
But when you hand them a single paragraph and ask them to read it out loud, they freeze.
They're not lazy, they're not unmotivated. He's choice exceptional. Right. He's gifted and has dyslexia.
So today we're going to talk about what that actually means and why it's so often missed and what it's like to live inside that brain. Right. That races ahead and get stuck at the same time.
Yeah.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Wow. We know a lot of kids.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah. I would say a lot of our students that come here have this.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Yes. I feel like it's finally having a little bit of its moment in the sun.
This is something that I think we've been able to identify for a long time, but it is finally having its moment in the sun. It's finally being recognized as.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Huh.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: There's actually a lot of kids like this. Right.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: So twice exceptional means. Right. Somebody is both gifted and has a learning difference. So it can be dyslexia, ADHD or autism.
The term matters because these two things can mask each other too.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Right. Because a gifted child can have strong reasoning skills and verbal skills and help them compensate through all their reading struggles.
And so dyslexia gets undiagnosed.
Or maybe the reading struggles drag down test scores for a student and so their giftedness is never identified either. Right.
So they can sometimes just get missed one or the other or even both.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Well, I'm like, because of the way statistics and averaging works, what happens is when you have one test score that's very, very high and one that's very, very low.
When you take the aggregate, that kid looks like he's exactly average. That kid looks like this is just an average run of the mill kid who's probably not putting in enough effort.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: It's the classic case of those kids in the middle get lost.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: So like with dyslexia especially.
Right. This is kind of a strange thing. Right. Because the brain that struggles to decode text can reason abstractedly. Right. They think in complex systems. They generate their original ideas, usually well beyond their grade level. Absolutely.
And teachers and parents describe the kids as being so smart but not doing
[00:07:01] Speaker A: a lot of work.
Story of my life right now.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: But they can't maybe do something based when they have to read something.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: So that. But is in there.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: That is in my. Not statistical opinion. Right. I do not have the numbers to back it up. And part of it is because this is so darn hard to identify.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: But in or the. Over the course of my now relatively lengthy career, I am not so young anymore.
But over the course of my career, the students that I have worked on with, more of them fall into this category.
I honestly can think of countless students in the past that have really, truly been gifted in an area and also had a significant learning disability. Correct. That was always there, just holding them back.
They could.
I mean, exactly this. They could tell me complex things and their brains would reason out beautifully.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: But asking them to do the basics was out of the question.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Correct.
So why does this get mixed, missed, blah, blah.
Well, compensation. Right. Our gifted kids are good at finding workarounds.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: They sure are. That should be a gift into and of itself, right? Yes.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Right. They memorize their sight words. They use context clues. They listen rather than read.
It might look like they're even reading fine until the material gets harder and that vocabulary gets harder. And so their workarounds stop working.
Sometimes that's around fourth grade. Sometimes it's a lot later.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, yeah.
Classic.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: So much so, so much.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: And I would say the adults that we.
Yes, this is very apparent.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally, totally agree.
Yeah. I think that is a classic profile of an older kid who comes in here for an assessment or even an adult that what I've started to see lately is we're getting quite a lot of calls for assessment that are parents and caregivers that are worried about dysgraphia.
And they are usually middle grade or older most of the time. Like that late elementary. Middle school is the bulk of calls we're getting right now. And they're like, well, it's dysgraphia. Because they can't write. They're reading just fine.
And on our end, that puts up our little prickly hairs on the back of our necks. And we go, are you sure they're reading just fine? Oh, yeah. They can tell me everything that happened in their book. Oh, yeah. They've never struggled with words. Oh, yeah. They memorized their sight words just fine. There was no issues at all. We saw nothing.
And most of the time, we try to look at our dyslexia assessment first with those families, and even though they're a little bit like, wait, what? That's not the issue. Often what we do find is, yeah, that kid was so good at compensation that they are actually not reading. They're faking it.
And that is why all of a sudden, you're showing the written output as so poor, because you can't fake that.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Correct. Yeah.
Also uneven testing profiles. Right. Your child might score in the 99th percentile for verbal reasoning and then the 10th percentile for reading fluency.
And really, schools average these out.
And so that makes a single composite score, and that erases the gap.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: And so if you had actually seen both those numbers, you'd be, whoa, what is happening here? But when you average them together and they go in the middle, you don't see the acting gap. It's fine.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Because that aggregate score is in the middle. Is in the middle.
Yeah. This is also what's known as the spiky profile.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Where we have high highs and low lows.
Classic dyslexia profile.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Right?
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Yeah, we see that all the time.
Those are those profiles, too, that parents will bring in here. And they're like, have you ever seen this before? And we'll be like, yes, yes.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: All the time.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: All the time. Yeah, absolutely.
You're be kind of like, whoa. And like, what tells that me? What that tells me is like, you got a really cool, special kid you've got.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Your kid does have some really high highs and low lows. And we can. We can work with that. We can capture those strengths to. To beef up those weaknesses.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: For sure.
Behavior is getting blamed instead of investigated. Right. So that frustration from that gap. Right. Because the kids that can think and what they can produce on paper often looks very different. Starts, you know, acting out, giving up, not caring, and then the issue really never gets evaluated because they're not.
I think it's just a behavior. There's not. They don't understand that there's frustration underneath it. Because there's a gap.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and often those are the kids who say, I don't care.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: You know, hey, what? Why are you interrupting the class? Because I can.
Those are those kids.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Right.
And then really, schools either have a really good gifted program or a good learning support program, but rarely does the system have both. Yeah. And so they don't know how really to support those kids.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's a real. It's a real struggle.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Right?
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
Interesting. You know, our last episode, if you guys are kind of listening chronological, we talked a lot about the self esteem and kind of emotional weight of dyslexia.
And really these kids with, you know, the twice exceptional, sometimes that's abbreviated as 2E.
So if you read 2E or you hear 2E, of course, education. Right. We got. We gotta abbreviate everything. We can't just call things what they are.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Right?
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Anything to just muddy the water a little bit. So there's just kind of a unique emotional weight with this twice exceptional 2e kind of label. Because it is like you're being told these super mixed messages.
You know, you're so, so, so bright and you need this extra help in the same conversation and that. It feels like whiplash.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: For those kids. Um, like, it, it just feels like, what? Like, listen, I either get it or I don't. That is how a undeveloped brain thinks.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I either get it or I don't. Like, what are we doing here?
Yeah. Like, those students, they feel like they're an imposter in gifted spaces.
And then they also feel like in spaces that are built for people with disabilities, they're like, I don't feel like I belong here. I don't. This is not the kind of support I need.
So they really kind of feel like they don't actually belong anywhere. And I think with all things forever, the pain is in the gap.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Right?
[00:15:49] Speaker A: So yikes here.
Anxiety, perfectionism.
I see this a lot with our students that we work with here.
Those of our kids who are like, they'll make a mistake and I mean, just like, will have to just almost compulsively erase and cover.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Yes.
They tear the page while they're erasing. Because they're erasing so hard.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
You know, or even more heartbreaking, Those kids who just quietly stop, they just stop trying because honestly, that failing just is kind of like, well, that's fine. At least I didn't try.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Like, at least I didn't put my whole heart into something and then it got crushed.
Right.
That's the hardest path to bring back to.
You know, that's like my biggest fear with all of our students is to not go down that path because it's the hardest to get them back off.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: And also. Right. Dyslexia isn't the opposite of giftedness. Yes. It's a different wiring of the same brain.
So, you know, strong picture thinking or strong verbal reasoning and weak print decoding is not a contradiction. It's just the profile of how they learn and how they think and how their brain works.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: And I think being very upfront with students, either children or adults about it, I think that helps them kind of lift that frustration piece.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: Definitely. And I think it, you know, I think like the whole twice exceptional.
I'm not a big fan of the language here because what I usually say to these students is that this is how human brains work. I think why we're hearing more and more about this is because we're kind of realizing actually this is how a human brain is wired. This is not actually really that exceptional.
This isn't.
This is that you have things that you are very, very good at and you have things that you are not that great at. You have struggles, you have struggles, you have strengths.
Welcome to the human condition. Welcome to being a human being about in the world.
That is, if we were tested on every little thing, that is how every single brain would react. We would have things we were excellent in, we would have things that were terrible at.
That's just the brain.
It's just the profile.
And so I do.
I find myself having issues kind of with the exceptional language and also even the gifted language. Like, yes, I want to celebrate a gift, but it kind of just puts somebody in like one box.
And so when a person who's labeled gifted eventually struggles, the emotional toll for them can be a bottom out. And that's why very unfortunately, we see that population struggling with mental health, especially in adulthood or young college age kids who've just sailed on by and been told, hey, you're gifted.
They get harder material and they're like, well, now I'm a failure because I
[00:19:37] Speaker B: can't do it now.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: I can't do it now.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.
So what actually does help?
Right? A full evaluation where you look at cognitive strength and different processing weaknesses. Right.
Because there's one thing we know.
If you can identify it and name it, it's easier to talk about and it's easier for that frustration to be kind of looked at differently.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: I think for sure, for sure.
You know, the structured literacy instruction. Right.
It's exactly what we do here. Like, you know, we.
We deliver that, you know, alongside intellectually challenging material. I think that is something I constantly have to tell people who don't understand what we do.
You know, sometimes they're kind of like, well, aren't you kind of dumbing it down for them? Like. No, not at all. Not at all. We are coming along. We are targeting the most basic skill, but we are using intellectually challenging material. And increasingly slow, like, increase. You know.
You know, we're. We're matching.
We're not trying to back content down to match their reading level. That often blows up in our face.
You know, it just. It's kind of. It reinforces the internal thought of like, well, I'm clearly stupid, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Using assistive technology. Right. Text to speech, audiobooks, speech to text.
They're not shortcuts. They're just how that brain gets its ideas past their bottleneck. Right? Absolutely. Especially for older students or adults where they still have to learn new things and they still. While they're learning structured literacy. Right. They can't just stop their life.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Exactly. I mean, I have, you know, students in college, very rigorous courses that. Yeah, we're breaking it down and we're working on, you know, Bible teams and we're working on closed syllables, but that doesn't mean we're.
That doesn't mean they still don't have coursework. That's heavy. And that's why I tell them to bring that stuff in so we can put it. We can put it out there. Hey, look, this thing that we did today, look, it's all over your textbook, correct?
Yeah. You know, I think just naming both things very explicitly, talking about.
Talking about both the strengths and the things that they struggle with.
You know, we're not just.
It is both. Both of these parts of you.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Make you who you are.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: You know, we're just. We can't just kind of ignore one and deal with the other. That's.
That's not being accurate.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Right?
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: And giving these students or learners choice, you know, to pursue what their strength areas are, and it protects their motivation and self concept, which is really important.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, totally agree. I just. I think that this is a kind of a fun topic.
I am excited to see this topic again. I feel like it is having kind of a moment in the sun right now. I feel like there is a lot more talk about this. Twice exceptional that Tui Experience. A lot more adults are coming kind of forward with their experiences.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: And I think the more we can name these things, and it is not a contradiction.
It is not.
You know, it's also not an aggregate. That.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Real story.
You know, so it's not just.
We're not just trying to tilt the scales one way or the other. We're just trying to tell an actual complex story of. This is what this profile looks like.
It is not abnormal or weird.
It is.
What I predict is we are going to find this more often because we are looking for it.
You know, so it's. It is not a something to be ashamed of or hide. It is how a human brain works. Truly.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And we need to build environments either in the classroom or the workplace or at a family where both get to exist and get supported. So not just one or the other. Right.
You're everything.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: Right. I mean, exactly.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: I mean, yeah, I. I think it's.
It will be interesting.
Like, these are interesting times to be in education.
They're just interesting times in general. And it's a fun topic.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: It is.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: And I. I think probably a lot of our listeners who have kids with learning disabilities in their home, you're probably nodding along and smiling because honestly, a lot of this is probably hitting home for you guys. It certainly hits home for my kid. It really does.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: So, Maggie, what's happening beyond dyslexia?
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
Well, as we record this, it is officially October, which I am excited about and also scared of because we have so many things.
There are so many.
I think last year I went, okay, I am stepping back, and we are not doing all these trick or treats and oops.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: We added more this week.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: We did add more.
We did add more.
So I think I made the stand kind of on my personal family. Like, listen, we're not doing this 20,000 times. It's too many times. It's too much.
I feel like October. I really love October. This is kind of my favorite time of year. I'm looking around and in southeastern Wisconsin, this is kind of like we're approaching peak color. We're just. I was kind of amazed pulling in the parking lot here at work this morning. I was of kind like, wow, the trees are like blazing red this today and yesterday. They were.
They were rad. They. They had color on them, but they were not as. Just full and vibrant.
So I. I do love this time of year. I'm. We are supposed to have, like, epically beautiful weather for the next couple of weeks. Like 60s, 70s, gorgeous and I'm here for all of that.
[00:27:18] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: What's going on with you, Nicole?
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Well, I think along the same lines, not only do we are doing a bunch of trunk or treats, but we decided we also are going to be in like a million conferences.
Some we're presenting at, some we're vendors at, some we're just going to. So yeah, it just makes it very interesting scheduling wise.
You have children and you need to be at these events and they just keep coming.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: You do. They don't. They don't stop. As it turns out.
I don't feel like we've hit a point this entire calendar year where I have felt like, ah, okay, we're in a good place.
No, that has yet to happen.
But I'm sure we're not alone.
Thank you guys for listening. Please follow us on social media and reach out if you have any questions or you would like us to discuss. Discuss a topic. If you do like our show, be sure to follow and rate our show on your favorite podcast players.
Those ratings, that's really how we get bumped up and then we get to help more listeners and we get to help more families. Thank you, everybody.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Thank you.
